Education

Education: We are working with graduate and undergraduate students from various disciplines to help train them to be the next leaders in autonomy

Narcan Delivery Drone for Opioid Overdose

Students working on a drone that could deliver NARCAN to remote areas in an emergency.

Opioid overdose killed more than 80,000 people in 2021. A drug that can counteract the effects of an overdose is readily available — Narcan — and easy to use via nasal spray. But it must be administered within 10 minutes, and ambulance services struggle to meet that window in remote areas. 

In collaboration with Purdue's nursing and biomedical programs, students have worked to develop a drone and navigation technology that can deliver an emergency dose of Narcan autonomously.

NIST UAS Triple Challenge: Lost Hiker Search and Rescue

This competition challenged teams to develop an automated way to find someone who may be lost in a forest. Purdue students, together with their counterparts at NC A&T, developed AI for a thermal camera to identify the shapes of humans who are partially obscured by foliage. The final stage of the competition was a field test of each team's technology.

The Purdue team finished in third place.

NXP Hover Games: Vertical Farming

A drone hovering in front of a vertical farming structure

The Hover Games goal is to increase sustainability in agriculture. In collaboration with In collaboration with Krishna Nemali in the Purdue College of Agriculture, students developed an image processing algorithm to approximate with high accuracy the conditions of a plant (growth, mass, etc.) in a vertical farming environment.

The system must integrate with existing, patented plant growth software. This technology is another opportunity to increase the scale and applications of UAVs.